memory-index

Index a Folder into MemPalace

This skill walks through indexing a folder's source code into pi-go's MemPalace — the 4-layer semantic memory system with SQLite storage and embedding-based search.

Once indexed, the agent can search the folder's contents by meaning, not just keywords, using the palace-search tool or pi memory search CLI.

Prerequisites

The embedding model (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) must be downloaded. Check with:

pi memory model status

If not downloaded:

pi memory model download

This fetches ~90 MB of ONNX model files to ~/.pi-go/models/. It auto-selects the optimal ONNX variant for the platform (quantized ARM64 on Apple Silicon, base on x86_64).

The model is optional. Without it, search falls back to FTS5 keyword matching. Semantic search requires the model; keyword search works without it.

Workflow

1. Verify the model is ready

pi memory model status

Output should show Model: all-MiniLM-L6-v2 with a path and size. If it says Model: not downloaded, run pi memory model download first.

2. Configure rooms (optional but recommended)

Create a mempalace.yaml at the repo root to map file patterns to semantic "rooms". This narrows the search space before embeddings fire, improving retrieval significantly (benchmark: 60.9% recall unfiltered → 94.8% with wing+room filtering).

wing: my-project          # top-level name (defaults to directory basename)

rooms:
  - name: api
    patterns:
      - "internal/api/**"
      - "internal/handler/**"
    keywords:
      - http
      - handler
      - route
  - name: models
    patterns:
      - "internal/models/**"
    keywords:
      - schema
      - struct
      - database
  - name: tests
    patterns:
      - "**/*_test.go"
    keywords:
      - test
      - mock
      - fixture

Rules for good rooms:

• 3–8 rooms is the sweet spot. Too few = no filtering power. Too many = sparse drawers.
• Use patterns (glob) for path-based assignment. Use keywords for content-based hints.
• Files not matching any room go to a default room named general.
• The wing defaults to the directory basename if omitted.